


The Pen is Mightier

by Franavu



Series: Critical Role - Stories in the Background [1]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Gen, Jester's pamphlet, POV Outsider, What is happening in the background, post episode 16
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-03
Updated: 2018-05-03
Packaged: 2019-05-01 16:16:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14524428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Franavu/pseuds/Franavu
Summary: She had been sitting in the Raven Queen’s temple when she found the pamphlet.Or, the effect of Jester's pamphlet on one woman of Zadash





	The Pen is Mightier

She had been sitting in the Raven Queen’s temple when she found the pamphlet. It had been months since her husband and son had died of a plague that swept through the poorer districts of Zadash. They hadn’t been able to pay for a healer and she was the only one who’d survived. With the loss of her husband’s pay and the debt to the temple for the funeral, pitiful as it had been, she wasn’t able to afford the shack her family had lived in. She now shared a room with three other women in a ramshackle boardinghouse, where on most nights the wind blew straight through the walls.

This month had been even worse than any of the others since her family had died. The attack on the Zauber Spire in the Tri-Spire meant that she hadn’t been able to go to her work as a cleaner in the estates in the district; she had lost almost a week of pay. She had paid the instalment on her debt, as she didn’t want to risk arrest by the Crownsguard. While she sat for the mandatory prayer after paying, she wondered if she’d be able to eat at all until she’d next get paid. She didn’t much care for prayer, what had the Raven Queen ever done for her after all, but it was expected, and supposedly counted against her debt. She doubted that, but she wouldn’t be surprised if the debt would suddenly go up if she negated on the prayer.

That was when she saw it, a little sheet of folded paper under one of the offering dishes. Curious, she quietly pocketed it when she walked up to the statue before leaving. Later, in her room, she read it, counting herself lucky her merchant father had been able to educate her before he ran afoul of a noble and a supposedly bad deal. Since that noble soon owned her father’s shop, she had her own ideas on the matter. It was about the Traveler, a deity of the Menagerie Coast, she thought. As she was reading the pamphlet, she felt a bit of warmth to her, for the first time since her family had died, and some of the bleak depression she had been walking around in faded. _What have I got to lose?_ She thought.

For the next few months, random ill luck hit the houses in the Tri-Spire, some where she cleaned and some where she did not. Who would recognize another servant after all? Furniture was moved just so that you couldn’t help but bump your shin when you got out of bed in the middle of the night, catnip was sprinkled on the entrance ways, statuary was defaced and some of the Chastity’s Nooks finest offerings found themselves moved from their hiding place to just where visitors couldn’t miss them. And if little trinkets went missing, from the back of a drawer or underneath a couch, who would notice? She was able to repay her debt a little bit faster, and even managed to save up a few coppers here and there.

And if the day she went to pay the last bit of her debt, she found a pendant with the symbol of her god on her bedside table, who would take note of it? But before she left the temple for the last time, while the sour priest was in the back to deal with her paperwork, she scrawled a moustache on the statue of the goddess, and if the light reflected of her pendant just so, there was no one to see.


End file.
